Is a bright, white kitchen. Glossy white cabinets. Maybe even a white countertop. Maybe white walls that extend up to a white ceiling.

Except now, my partner in crime when it comes to all things white, bright, modern, minimal, whatever you want to call the opposite of Rachel Ray’s kitchen, has said, and I quote,

“I’M WORRIED IT’S GOING TO BE TOO STERILE.”

I nearly fell over. I thought he was joking. He was not. I was confused. He seemed to be confessing something he’d been holding in for years.

But let me tell you, it won’t be. For starters, I guarantee that there will be 10 if not 100 colorful items cluttering the kitchen on a regular basis. From the blue and red in a PBR can to the yellow bananas to the tan peanut butter and the green succulent (if it’s still alive when the kitchen is done), it will be a beautiful rainbow of colors. The white will just be a clean, perfect backdrop for that rainbow to shine.

Also, the counter is open for discussion. Maybe a light grey-white-marbly mix? Stainless steel, if any of the vendors get back to us with pricing below a bajillion dollars. This material, which I think looks like jelly soap or pimento loaf or something soft and smooshy and gross, is being fought for by Mr. Too-Sterile-Kitchen and he’s starting to convince me. (Unless he googles pimento loaf…I am so right)

Also, our appliances and fixtures? Not sterile. More like dirty and covered in food splatters. We will not have a weird, unusable coffee maker or bluish-white recessed lighting from behind a giant wall of steel cabinets. Or her.

Let’s not forget, there will be a butcher block island-cart-thingy on the far side of the kitchen. And some natural wood shelves above it. We’ve already agreed to this. Wood = warm. And it will be pushed up against a wall that will be painted – wait for it – black! The opposite of white. Amiright?

And while it’s easy to forget because it’s been under brown paper held down by rows of painters tape for so long, our kitchen floor is a deep, rich, warm, non-sterile, ebony-stained dark brown.

Finally, to top it off, we need light to reflect off the white kitchen and make it glow like a space age doctor’s office. So let’s talk about the lighting. Which means talking about rigging some poor light fixture to work with the janky (yeah I said janky) electrical situation that every room is blessed with in this house, the kitchen included. And so, we’ve decided to do something like run all the cords (probably a color like red or gold or even orange, like the extension cord I will forever associate with my parents’ electric lawnmower) out of our single ceiling light box, and wrap them in an “as seen in some Scandinavian person’s home” manner over a long copper pipe we took out of some other room. Hey, you know what? Copper is a warm color…